Posted
by
kdawson
on Sunday April 18, 2010 @01:46PM
from the ain't-nobody's-business-if-i-do dept.

An anonymous reader points out a story on the effect of a new law on file sharing on campuses — in short, it may not make much difference. "Students who are about to graduate often hand down the tricks of stealing music and movies to the next senior class. ... At the College of New Jersey, that means surreptitiously finding a new home each year for a computer holding an enormous directory of illegal files on the campus. ... The machine runs software called Direct Connect, which lets people on a local network easily trade files among their hard drives in a way that is usually undetectable to anyone outside the network. ... Educause recently unveiled a website with information about the new regulations. It provides case studies from six 'role-model campuses,' listing the steps they are taking to combat piracy. Another page lists 57 legal sources of music and movies on the Web. But when asked which campuses have forged new policies in reaction to the law, Educause officials were unable to name any."

You are never going to stop folks from trading files. All you can do is try and make it difficult. And that brings its own problems because it usually causes the stuff not to work well and attracts people who like challenges to break your "protection". I believe the model of charging less would work better.

Exactly music is a service and should be treated as such, that's why I like to say I purchase tickets not albums.

And what about when the music cannot be taken around on tour? Not all music is performed by small bands that can go from venue to venue. There are for electronic works for tape created at places like IRCAM. Sometimes concerts are so costly to put on that ticket prices are unlikely to cover the expenses -- I've gone to hear music at concert halls where it's hard to believe that ticket sales even paid for the huge amount of people hired for the venue's coat check, let alone the orchestra.

Some amount of public subsidy and patronage is already present to support music that either can't be put on in concert, or isn't profitable to put on in concert. As it becomes increasingly less realistic for artists to expect payment for every copy made of their work, it's worth supporting public subsidy and patronage models at the same time as calling for people to buy tickets to see their favourite rock bands in concert.

Trent Reznor is a very talented man. What about musicians who are weak performers while a genius in the studio? People who suffer from serious anxiety problems? People whose target demographic is small and distributed across the world? There are plenty of very capable live bands out there who are having trouble pulling in big enough crowds ends meet, and we're supposed to believe that every niche electronic act can put a show together and do the same?

It's a bit of a catch-22. Most of those bands would not exist without the immediate dispersal methods of file sharing: people aren't likely to plop any sum of money down on an 'unknown'.

Are they 'entitled' to profit from their ventures when people like them? No, they're not; that's not how it works in this world. Should they be compensated by those who like their work? Of course - if they want to continue to see the fruits of those people's labors (assuming those people are not content to work for free).

It's a trade-off of sorts. You can't have both bounty and high cost in a medium which is, essentially, free for the taking. Human nature doesn't allow for it (and I'd argue, laws to the contrary are immoral).

They can still get a contract to do studio work for soundtracks, advertising, etc. They can release one song and get you to pay for more if you like. All sorts of new options will pop up once the gates are broken down.

I wonder if they have a good way to setup an internal p2p cache server. Hmm it might be actually easy, if unofficial word is let out to run a particular program, just setup an internal server for it, and have it host the most popular files. Updating those files automatically would be the only challenge.

If there aren't enough people that like him to cover the costs of his work, then he sucks. The whole problem with public subsidies in any and all areas is that anyone who needs one shouldn't get one, and those who could make good use of the money don't need it.

If there aren't enough people that like him to cover the costs of his work, then he sucks.

It's easy for a lot of people to claim that, but if suddenly all the works supported by public funding suddenly disappeared, then a lot of them without be happy, because public support of the arts goes into more than you suspect. Think about classic cinema, e.g. Bergman or Fellini: eventually these films attracted a following, but they couldn't have been made to begin with without some amount of support. Even in the U

Bollocks you can't! A professional musician that does this will just hire a band, its extremely common. Lenny Kravitz, Trent Reznor, Billy Corgan, all do this, and so on and so forth.

The parent is right, if they can't play it live, or even press play on a laptop and dance around a bit, then they are not performers. If you are not providing a service, you are dependent on a model which no longer makes sense. Turn of last century, recording was non-existent, and music was a service not a product. Recording wa

The parent is right, if they can't play it live, or even press play on a laptop and dance around a bit, then they are not performers.

It's sad that your conception of music is so small that you think it necessarily has to involve "dancing around".

With tape pieces, it's hard to attract audiences to buy tickets and hear it out on the town when the work is invariable: there is no difference hearing it in a venue and hearing it from a disc or off downloaded files, especially now that many classic tape pieces ar

It's sad that your conception of music is so small that you think it necessarily has to involve "dancing around".

It's not worth debating rationally with a lot of the posters in this thread. They are just trying to justify ripping off the work of others without giving anything back to those who did the hard work, so they don't have to feel guilty. Recently, they have latched onto this whole live performance thing, but of course there is all that diversity you mentioned, and the live performance argument doesn't work for movies, software, or indeed just about anything protected by copyright other than certain types of m

It's not worth debating rationally with a lot of the posters in this thread. They are just trying to justify ripping off the work of others without giving anything back to those who did the hard work, so they don't have to feel guilty.

Whoever those posters are, I'm not among them. My point has been that in order to ensure that artists get some compensation for their work, we ought to increase public subsidy. I support politicians who want to maintain high funding levels for the arts, and I'm suspicious of

I, OTOH, am on neither 'side', but think copyright is dead. Not that it 'should' be...that it is.

The practical fact is, without some degradation per copy, and/or high costs to copy, there can be no such thing as copyright

If things are infinitely copyable over 'free' channels, with no work per copier, and almost no work to originally copy...that's it. it's over.

This isn't some 'Copyright should be dead', it's not any sort of moral judgment at all. Hell, for all I know, the death of copyright will cause a cultural disaster. It's just a fact.

Copyright was created to stop people from taking a work, spending time and money, and reselling it. That's the point, that's what it manages to stop. It stops the business of copying, when copying had to be a business because no one was out there making their own 35mm film copies, and even if they were, the echos of those copies would quickly disappear as the copies got worse over time...and no one would fund that without any sort of profit possibility, which exposed them to legal sanctions as any illegal business would be.

Without that effort required...well...

Imagine a hypothetical world where sex was a heavily regulated industry, and, for some reason, took an amazing amount of prep work and skill. Certain people were allowed to charge for it, and did.

Others operated outside the law. Sometimes large illegal brothels would spring up and provide mostly identical sex (Piracy rings.), and eventually get shut down by the law, and sometimes people would setting up crappy locations and manage to provide really bad sex. (Aka, analog copies.)

And now imagine someone figured out how to provide 100% identical sex using a standard bed everyone had in their house, as long as someone who had had sex at some time showed them how.

And now imagine someone figured out how to copy stuff exactly using the standard computer everyone had in their house, as long as someone had a copy on a computer somewhere.

Copyright is dead, or at least has been fatally wounded and will be dead soon. It's coasting right now on the fact that a) they own congressmen, and b) citizens are amazingly apathetic. But I suspect in, very soon, the laws will change, simply because people are not following them. I am not, in any sense, arguing this is a 'good' thing, just a 'true' thing.

Give me $10,000 and I'll build you a studio that will return sound quality so close to a multi million dollar equivalent that 99% of people would not know the difference. Recording is very cheap these days, and does not justify the exorbitant rates we are charged for digital media.

I like to listen to audiobooks, some of which are 20 or more hours long and are read by a single skilled actor who 'plays' all the differnt voices of the different characters. Do I purchase tickets to a 20 hour performance?

You don't need 100% success to have a victory. Sure people will still do it, but if you don't make it easy for them to do it less people will go ahead and do it any ways. If you make file sharing so hard that only the geeks can do it. Then that is enough to stop all the non-geeks.

Excessive use of antibiotics just gets you antibiotic resistant strains.

Sure, and if you have an incurable disease affecting one limb, as a last resort you amputate rather than allow the disease to endanger the entire system.

If you think the pirate community is going to overcome the entire weight of the legal profession, the political players and the big money spinners through sheer force of arrogant denial, then I suspect some time in the next two or three years, you are going to learn a painful lesson. I'm only sorry that quite a few innocent people are going to be deeply inc

If you think the pirate community is going to overcome the entire weight of the legal profession, the political players and the big money spinners through sheer force of arrogant denial, then I suspect some time in the next two or three years, you are going to learn a painful lesson. I'm only sorry that quite a few innocent people are going to be deeply inconvenienced when the remaining healthy tissue in the limb is sacrificed to be sure the disease is contained.

You think they'll sacrifice computers and the internet to save the music and movie industry? Sorry, there's a lot of them who would like to, but it's just not going to happen. And the legal profession will fight for any side; they're hired guns in this, not interested parties.

No, I think they will sacrifice the relatively free and open Internet we have today in favour of a system they control with compulsory censorship and/or supervision, combined with laws that allow for major punishment of those who commit minor infringements without the usual safeguards and due process.

If you don't think this can happen because "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", I would remind you that:

The biggest international copyright negotiations since the WIPO treaties

I think they will sacrifice the relatively free and open Internet we have today

In context of this article it won't do a thing. If you have thousands of students living together, they don't need Internet to trade songs. The horse - an exact digital copy - has left the barn long ago; MP3 codec and pocket-sized multi-gigabyte players just make it practical. There is a a huge mass of music out there - essentially everything is there - and if the government introduces artificial scarcity by clamping down on copying then students will make sure to copy and store *everything* they come across, even if they don't like the music - just because it may be harder to do in the future.

Internet is important only for geeks who don't meet anyone, ever. But such geeks are probably sophisticated enough to get what they need - the government will be using a pretty rough net; they can monitor standard ports, but they can't look into SCP traffic or decode everything that is posted in a.b.*.encrypted, or try to figure out why foo.o is 4 MB long and the linker says it's corrupted, while foo.c is just "void foo() {}"...

Laws are being proposed to mandate spyware, which you can bet will also restrict the use of "dubious" alternative systems like Linux and OSS if they get passed

All the spyware in the world is useless on a computer that is not on the network. With prices of computers going down fast, it is not unreasonable to see more and more people having two computers - one for Internet and one without a network card. The government would need to set up a Computer Police to bust doors and search premises (since a 1 TB portable drive fits in a shirt pocket.)

College kids are learning something at school? Excellent! Oh, it's how to glom files while outsmarting "the man"? Hmm, well, not so excellent... but it will come in handy when they're in the corporate world having to steal customers from competitors and steal ideas from their colleagues to get promotions.

... causes the stuff not to work well and attracts people who like challenges to break your "protection"

At least for many, breaking the "protection" is not the goal... making stuff work well is. If the people making DRM were to come up with a way that provided the "protection" they (claim) to desire, while also working well on every platform, there wouldn't be as much interest in "breaking" it.

As a user exclusively of FOSS platforms, I consider that every content provider that fails to make sure that my platforms are supported is a content provider that has no interest in revenues from me or other users of these platforms. As such, if WE somehow manage to access their content through means that don't involve any payment, I see no loss to the owner. They didn't have sufficient interest in our money to make an effort to get it. So it is by their own decision that they won't get revenue from us; now ours.

I wonder if anyone has done the math on this... but if you lowered the price of Photoshop to $50... would it create more profit than at its current price $669? (amazon)

No. Common people don't need Photoshop. Most would still pirate it and spend the $50 elsewhere. Professionals who need it can afford it, usually (mostly companies). So there's no point in lowering Photoshop.

Common people all know of photoshop. It is what people refer to whenever an image is retouched. People know photoshop like people around the world know coca cola and levis.

It is the tool... and it doesnt just apply to professionals. It applies to hobbiests, students etc. There are many people who work professionally with photoshop that got their start with pirated versions.

I'm not asking if photoshop is for the common man or not. It is the standard that everyone knows about... but what i'm asking is if anyo

I wonder if anyone has done the math on this... but if you lowered the price of Photoshop to $50... would it create more profit than at its current price $669?

Adobe has already figured that one out. The relatively price-insensitive customers (professional design shops) they gouge out the wazoo, while they sell a much cheaper program (Elements) missing just a few features (which are key to the pros but not the dabblers) to gather in money from the masses. And they sell the full programs to students for a m

Price still is a factor obviously. People dont want elements, they want photoshop.

I do think Adobe has probably figured out the math on this... but it doesnt mean that the results were bad. It may just be that they havent tried the "$50 photoshop" plan yet simply out of fear that it might not work... or perhaps such a change in price would take time to win people over with pirated copies.

But the general public won't buy the alternatives. The mass computer-using public has only heard "photoshop" to the point it's a verb not unlike google.
Most people will want to get Photoshop because everyone knows that's how you edit pictures. Anything else just sounds like the salesman trying to sell some cheap crap.
When the average non-techie computer user looks for Photoshop and sees it for over $600, they won't look for alternatives to purchase. They'll find their nearest computer nerd friend who c

I don't know. You could always name and shame a particular college on the front page of Slashdot, citing the exact method that the students use to share files. That'd probably do enough to drop a few people in the shit.

You can bet that they're already charging what earns them maximum profit. Their campaign against piracy is a side project to try to secure those profits in the long term.

The problem is that you really can't compete with piracy. For music and movies, it's not really possible to differentiate your product with the millions of digital copies (without packaging a whole lot of physical goods with the album/movie, and even then, it then becomes "overpriced stuff" with a disc thrown in). If you try to lower your p

Stealing is better because it leaves the company unharmed (while hurting the individual)? What kind of reasoning is that?

I just wanted to point out that trying to confuse the two is counterproductive. People feels that there is no harm done in pirating things and all the industry looks silly in comparison. Same reason that if one law is disproportionate every law seems disproportionate.

As for games I stopped paying and playing when I switched to linux a lot of time ago. I only buy music on magnatune after m

Apparently you don't understand the definition of counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is when you make an imitation of something, and pass it off as the real thing. Whatever the illicit copying of music is, it is patently not counterfeiting.

The equivalent of counterfeiting in music, would be for some third-rate band to to a cover of a song by a famous artist, and pass it off as the real thing. For example, a Led Zeppelin cover band not admitting they were a cover band, and saying that they actually are the real

The equivalent of counterfeiting in music, would be for some third-rate band to to a cover of a song by a famous artist, and pass it off as the real thing. For example, a Led Zeppelin cover band not admitting they were a cover band, and saying that they actually are the real Led Zeppelin.

Wait, don't pirates hire studio performers to make "greatest hits of the decade" albums, and then sell the things via mail-order, often implying that the songs are by the original performers?

Whatever the illicit copying of music or other creative works is, it's patently not counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is when someone creates an imitation of something, and passes it off as the real thing. The classic example is fake bank notes.

The musical equivalent of counterfeiting would be if a third-rate band covers a song by a famous band, and passes it off as being the original. For example, a Led Zeppelin cover band who does not admit to being a cover band, but claims that they actually are the real Le

Apologies for the duplicate post. There was some quirk in slashdot where my original just disappeared - I even looked for it in my post history, but it wasn't there. So I posted again, and then the original showed up. Weird.

USB drives?? Think bigger. A 1 TB external HD is far more effective if physical size and convenience of portability are less of a concern. I'm sure many co-workers and college dorm students already share files via external hard drives.

Indeed. External drive enclosures with SSD's are getting down to the size of a small paperback book. Easily concealable, and even more easy to dump in a garbage can somewhere without losing much, if it becomes necessary.

Maybe not as "convenient" for some people as broadband sharing is, but nearly un-prosecutable, given how common and how inexpensive drives of large capacity are becoming.

Once again, technology is bypassing antiquated business models and the efforts of those who hold

That's basically what we did when I went to college. Someone would host the DC++ server, and everyone else would connect to it and share files over it. You had to have 1 GB of shared files to join.

ResNet didn't give a shit, and in fact for a couple of years the guy who hosted the server was about as high up in ResNet as a student can get. We were using a ton of bandwidth, but as long as it was on the internal on-campus network they didn't care. In fact, I heard that we were kind of wink-and-nudge supported by the actual network administrators - college students are going to pirate stuff anyway, so they'd far prefer we do it on the local network, and leave the gathering of new materials to guys who'll use a VPN to a dedicated usenet box.

At my school, we just used SMB shares. This article reminds me of the time we were discussing the possibility of building a machine to replace that of a graduating senior, just so the location of his massive Simpsons collection wouldn't change. I also remember very fondly when I heard in conversation that my machine was down over the weekend - from a person I had never met before, and who didn't know when he mentioned it that he was talking about my machine.. When your computer is known by people before you yourself are, that's an achievement.:)

So really, all this article has accomplished is to fill my Sunday afternoon with waves of happy nostalgia. Was I supposed to be shocked and outraged?

When your computer is known by people before you yourself are, that's an achievement.

Most people would consider that an anti-achievement in social skills. That's nerds for you, I guess.

Having a social life is totally different than achieving something. To create something, and have your creation become widely known and respected, without you saying "hey everybody, look at this thing I made!" is a good feeling - whether it's a painting or a novel or a piece of software or a social networking web site or a search engine or a college porn server.

Eh, back circa ~2000 there were the usual SMB shares used by most students. You'd find the occasional decent collection of software, porn, music, and movies this way.

The entire campus (small private college) had a T1 to share, so people did use these shares liberally. Even then, things could get a little congested (I seem to recall that our dorm was on two 48-port 10BT hubs). I doubt it'd have been half as popular if we had bandwidth to spare with things like Pandora and Hulu.

I wouldn't say jail is merited, but yeah, what I did was wrong. On the other hand, now that I have the means, I buy good movies/games/music. It was simply that at the time, I was broke (as is pretty much any college student), so I couldn't buy these things the way I wanted to (and yes, I did want to).

We have the same system with DC++ here, including support from ResNet, though the minimum share level is 5GB. Problem now is that since the system is tolerated by the admins, to cover their own skins (understandably) file sharing has been restricted to non-copyrighted files, with violators being permanently banned from DC++. As such it's hardly used anymore except for finding things like Linux distros without cutting into internet bandwidth allotment, and sneakernet's becoming more popular again.

and I'm WAY too old for this, there was no internet to speak of when I was in college. We pirated music the old fashioned way, which analog cassette tapes. One guy would buy a new album (an "album" was like what we now call a compact disk, but it was about 1 foot in diameter and made of black plastic) and bring it back to the dorm, and pretty soon everyone who wanted it would have a second or third generation cassette dub (and yes, these were perfectly listenable). That was actually better than file shar

I think the point was that it is centralized and easy to access. You don't have to hit multiple torrent sites, hope enough seeders are on, worry about campus firewalls, log on to warez sites, or trade USB keys like mentioned above. . . you just sit down, connect to the server, and start browsing.

There's also tons of sharing going on just before and after (and often during), gamer meets (which usually have 2 or 3 bands of wireless channels all clogged up in addition to multiple gigabit and sometimes 10 gigabit ad-hoc LANs).

I'm a sophomore undergraduate at a relatively large university in California, and the volume of filesharing I see my classmates engage in is enormous.

Most of the discussion about filesharing (here on Slashdot and elsewhere) seems to focus on P2P, but in my experience BitTorrent/Gnutella/P2P darknets are just the tip of the iceberg.

The vast majority of the filesharing volume I see here is by sneakernet and private servers. The house I live in has a server with upwards of 3 TB of movies and music; all of our residents can log in.

I've seen people merge their own several-GB collections with the collection on the server. Last year, I lived in a frosh dormitory; there was no server, but it was common for people to lend each other iPods or merge media collections on each other's laptops. That kind of sharing takes a few minutes to transfer a few GB--it's on an entirely different plane from the type of sharing the RIAA and MPAA focus on, transferring one song or one movie at a time over P2P.

Incidentally, the media server setup I described is not unique to the house I live in--most of the houses and some of the dorms at my university have one; nor is it unique to colleges and universities--the startup I interned at two years ago had one, too.

So when the RIAA/MPAA sues a single mom for her kid's Kazaa downloads, I see it as beating a dead horse. The real sharing is on the scale of GB and TB at a time, not individual songs. On the rare occasion when I do find something missing from the media libraries I have access to, I'll torrent it using PeerGuardian to block corporate IPs, so I'm unlikely to show up on any logs the RIAA keeps.

By focusing their legal efforts on P2P users, I think that the media cartels may have drawn out the battle while losing the war. Yes, we're more reticent now to use BitTorrent. But we've merely moved to faster, more local, less traceable forms of sharing.

I have to ask: do you see filesharing to be kind of like pot-smoking, in that "some other people say it's wrong, but it isn't hurting anyone else, so who cares?" Do you believe it's wrong, but participate anyway? Or do you actually believe it's a right that's being wrongly suppressed?

If it's either of the first of those, why do you think it is that nobody challenges the ethics of these private servers? Do you not have any peers whose moral code says "No, filesharing is wrong, you guys are ripping off my favorite band, I'm turning you in to the ethics board?" Are you're saying that really, out of the thousands of students your university, and of every other university situation you are aware of, that not a single student complains about the inappropriateness of it?

I'm not trying to fish for snitches or get anyone in trouble with this question, but I'm just pretty much surprised that nobody complains. Not even the sons or daughters of (RI|MP)AA execs or artists, whose very education might be paid for by the media being copied?

I think it's not a question of ethics, and here's why: you can't share a secret with a million people and expect them to keep it.

The idea that you can "lend" something that consists purely of a stream of bits (such as a song or video) to someone, or sell it to them while preventing them from sharing it, is a myth. (Software is a bit different, because software is more than just bits; for example, MS does have partial success in getting people to pay for Windows by denying pirates the aspects of Windows t

I have to ask: do you see filesharing to be kind of like pot-smoking, in that "some other people say it's wrong, but it isn't hurting anyone else, so who cares?" Do you believe it's wrong, but participate anyway? Or do you actually believe it's a right that's being wrongly suppressed?

If it's either of the first of those, why do you think it is that nobody challenges the ethics of these private servers? Do you not have any peers whose moral code says "No, filesharing is wrong, you guys are ripping off my favorite band, I'm turning you in to the ethics board?" Are you're saying that really, out of the thousands of students your university, and of every other university situation you are aware of, that not a single student complains about the inappropriateness of it?

I'm not trying to fish for snitches or get anyone in trouble with this question, but I'm just pretty much surprised that nobody complains. Not even the sons or daughters of (RI|MP)AA execs or artists, whose very education might be paid for by the media being copied?

I think that's pretty much reason that everybody around here seems so confident that the RIAA and their ilk are going to lose in the end -- for the vast majority of people, sharing of "trivial" stuff like music really isn't a bad thing; at most, it's just sort of "wink-wink-nudge-nudge wrong".

Even the industry's attempts to demonize it (like happened with marijuana) are ineffective, because it's something that most people have already done themselves, so they know in their gut that it's a natural and heal

I assume you took exception to the word "else." Smoking weed delivers more tar and carcinogens into the body than smoking tobacco. This can cause health problems just as surely as smoking cigarettes, but since it's not smoked in the same quantities as tobacco, (and is not physically addictive,) the danger and damage is usually a lot lower. But you're fooling yourself if you think pot is 100% harmless.

At my university (40k students), we have a DC network and the IT here are not just aware of it, but some of the IT guys are the same guys who maintain it. Our university is happy to look the other way because the sharing is virtually undetectable outside the network, and we have plenty of bandwidth in network to move gig files around in seconds while not compromising the connection to the outside world. The less we share outside the DC network, the less letters they get from the RIAA (which they already ignore for the most part).

By the way, its articles like this that shed light on these networks, which we certainly don't need.

If we mark off those resources for legal downloading (in the "comprehensive list of alternatives" link at the Educause site) that still don't work with FOSS platforms, how many remain? I know at least Magnatune is among them.

Magnatune is a really under-appreciated source of good music. They have all of their music available free, online, as creative commons with a short audio blurb at the end. As such, they're totally cool with you using their music in a non-commercial CC work. Additionally, they have a monthly service for only about $15 where you can download as much music as you want in just about every format, including mp3, ogg, and lossless formats. The best part is they're not evil: half of everything goes directly to the

My school tried a variety of solutions in reaction to P2P file sharing: 1) bandwidth caps for most network traffic outside of the school's network 2) Provided a DRM-encumbered music service for students and 3) developed its own P2P software to share files for "legitimate", "academic" use. It didn't stop illegal file sharing entirely of course, and from what I hear the Resident Life tech support was pretty much complicit in piracy as well. Still, better than nothing.

Yea, we have bandwidth caps at my uni too...but there's no shortage of ways around them. Because if I want to download one Linux ISO, I'm already over my weekly cap - and as the VP of the Linux Users Group, there have been times when I needed 3 or 4 DVD images within a span of a couple hours. But as I said, there's no shortage of ways around the caps. You can download from wireless, you can get on someone's connection in town (frats, apartments, businesses), you can connect through the campus proxy server,

Students don't have much money (much less than people with jobs), but still have the same needs, created by the industry and our dynamic culture. The only way for these people to fullfill these needs is to piracy. I don't condone piracy.. but I have to say that the other option is frustration.

I don't theres any solution. But theres also no damage either: these people will not buy anyway. Once these people finish his studios and get a job, these same people will start buying things again, wen buying is easier.

Students don't have much money (much less than people with jobs), but still have the same needs, created by the industry and our dynamic culture. The only way for these people to fullfill these needs is to piracy. I don't condone piracy.. but I have to say that the other option is frustration.

I don't theres any solution. But theres also no damage either: these people will not buy anyway. Once these people finish his studios and get a job, these same people will start buying things again, wen buying is easier.

Let students warez his music, there are things more important for us.

You used the wrong word above when you said "needs". Music and movies are not needs. They are "wants". They are wants that are skillfully created by advertisers, marketers, producers, and talented artists and engineers, and they are presented as needs and sold as needs, but they are not. Any confusion you have between needs and wants is a lesson you really should learn now in order to survive in the modern world without going head-first into debt. People who don't learn this lesson soon think they need

That the arts are necessary to a life worth living is a principle that goes all the way back to the Greeks (and probably beyond). Sure, someone downloading a Lady Gaga track is probably fulfilling a mere want, but fine music, film and books are all things that are needs and can be had from internet sources.

Well, Mr. Karma: Pedantic, there's a class of needs you've probably not heard of then: "Social needs." If you go without movies, music, TV, whatever, you're segregating yourself out from a significant part of social culture. Without that common touchstone, you no longer have a point of commonality with other people in your culture, thus you are now less able to relate to and interact with other people. You may not be kicked out of school for not seeing Avatar, but you might be ostracised. And since you need

In more technologically advanced countries the latest generation of broadband is plenty good at home. Even my parents and my uncle are moving to fiber connections now with 10/10 Mbit as the lowest, which is plenty and on upload even faster than my cable line. The whole "limited bandwidth" is going to be some oddity of the past in a few decades because even a fairly notorious HD hog such as myself doesn't download 100 GB/day which is what a saturated 10 Mbit line will upload. For comparison, a complete binar

A defining moment of my life came in 1998, when I finally landed a coveted ISP job. (Go ahead, laugh, it was a big deal back then.) At last, I had local 100Mb access to a Usenet server with a full alt.binaries feed. A co-worker had spools upon spools of burned CDs of MP3s. I spent one ten-hour shift examining these CDs one by one. There was almost nothing that I actually cared to listen to. A notable exception was the soundtrack to Tron (

At least with filesharing technologies, the guy who is merely hoarding for the mere sake of it is still providing those files to others out there who have a real interest in it. On a P2P network I'm on, some people have accumulated music they never intend on listening to, but they keep it in their shares to help out those who are into it.

Back in the day, we'd hook up five or so cassette tape player in a row when someone got a fresh album, and make five tapes. We had lots of posters in the Student Union (we could even get beer there, that's how old I am) which said "home taping kills music". When CD's came out for twice the price of the vinyl, we saw how true that was. NOT.
I've advised my kids to not upload, and share only with those they know in the real world. So far, I now have more music than I could listen to in a a normal lifespan, with no p2p or dodgy websites.
Students hiding data from the RIAA (actually their terrified school ISP)-imagine that ! I have no fear for the new generation.

When I was in college back in 2000, a lot of my friends ended up getting work supplement jobs with 'Computing Services' on campus, doing the mundane desktop/printer/PC phone support to free up the campus sysadmin's time. Little did our close-nit group of friends find out the sysadmin's themselves had a huge storage server restricted by access-control lists that was loaded with mp3s, movies, dvdrips, ect. It was sort of a speak-easy to get access to it, but again, as the title states, when 'everyone' is in

I had a friend at uni who used to buy packaged foodstuffs and then send them back to the "If you're not completely satisfied" address with a fictional complaint. 9 times out of 10 he'd get a crate of said product by way of compensation; he survived for 3 years, barely paying for anything he ate or drank in this manner and you're amazed that people are swapping music without paying for it?

If any single group of people can find a way to get things without paying for them, it's student. Intelligent, poor, lots of free time = win.

I go to a university in Canada with about 25000 students. The exact same thing happens here, people who run resnet know DC++ exists and they look the other way. They actually moderately appreciate it because it means that fewer people are grabbing files from outside the network which a) means the RIAA is going to send them fewer legal threats and b) the university uses less bandwidth, since everything within resnet costs them nothing.

I know its stated in TFA, but such regulations only effect on campus students, and at a school like mine, that's only about 5-10% of the total student body. So this regulation most likely has absolutely no effect on 90% of the students. And even the freshmen on campus know the ways around it, one of my friends always just uses the wireless of his off campus fraternity house to do all of his illegal downloading.

Before reading this article, and your post as well, I had no idea that college students were so F'ing clueless and helpless. For even 10% of the student body to feel in any way limited by these regulations baffles me to no end.

A large number of universities require students to live in on-campus housing for the first two years, pushing the percentage up towards 50% (though there's of course an exemption for people whose families are in the area).

mmm heavy torrenters (whether downloading legal or illegal torrents but there aren't all that many legal ones out there) are a nightmare from a network point of view. Thats why so many providers take steps to deprioritise, throttle or even outright block it.

TCP/IP works on the principle of throttling back when it sees congestion. If every connection follows the same rules for throttling back (and there is no traffic shaping in place) then every connection will get about the same amount of bandwidth.

Since these kids are paying ludicrous costs for their education, are likely to enter a very contracted workforce if they're lucky, whilst competing globally, having future tax obligations thrust upon them to bail out their parents who somehow believed their entitlement to vast amounts of unearned income from housing was justified, at the very least I think society owes them a few shitty Adam Sandler movies.

You must be a kid. Most college students don't pay the majority of their own tuition themselves, for one thing. And (at public universities in the US, anyway) tuition only covers a minority share of the cost of an education. That percentage has been going up in recent years, but it's still way south of 50% of the cost - taxpayers are paying the majority of it.

First the client does most of the work not the hubs. I'm using and playing with uHub, runs on Linux. Simple compile but config is ALL via text files - ick. Gee it's Linux so no big surprise - have their web site handy for config help. DC++ is the client I'm using but I will likely look for another since it cannot handle UNC shares as targets. It chunks up transfers like a torrent does so if things drop you can restart and pull from multiple sources if needed.

Thats another thing to figure out; how can the school punish when the police cannot find any evidence to make a case?

The school is not required to use the same burden of proof that the police are required to use in order to convict in a criminal case. Criminal cases usually require evidence proving the crime "beyond a reasonable doubt [wikipedia.org]." Civil cases usually require evidence to prove the wrong-doing beyond a "preponderance of the evidence [wikipedia.org]," meaning there must be a 51% or greater chance that the wrong-doing